Tag: noise pollution

“Noise Pollution: A Modern Plague” Response

This journal article was a very good-follow up to the New Yorker article that graphed and plotted the noise complaints in all neighborhoods in the city; in other words, it was nice to combine the statistics with the hard, scientific facts about the damage that noise pollution can do to us. It even discussed noise in cities just a few centuries ago and empires that existed a few millennia in the past, so it is not as if noise is a new issue. However, with our increasing population and urbanization, it is important to note that deafening sound will become more frequent and unpleasant unless we do something about it now. In fact, cities have become synonymous with noise havens and the suburbs and countryside have been signified by peaceful, tranquil abodes. To be honest, cities will always be louder than these areas because of the sheer density of people and buildings, but the decibel levels that they reach are just obscene, and nobody should have to be subjected to them.

The “Adverse Health Effects of Noise” section was extremely detailed and perfectly outlined how humans are harmed by noise; as I mentioned in my last response, many animals have more sensitive ears than we do, so these effects are multiplied significantly for them. Other than the obvious effects of hearing impairment and sleep disturbances, and other physiological effects such as endocrine and circulatory system issues, noise pollution causes many psychological problems as well, impacting a person’s ability to speak, think sanely, perform simple tasks, and even interact with others. At first, I thought that these were too indirectly related to and thus extrapolated too far from noise pollution, but after a second glance, they are perfectly reasonable; a person’s health is holistic and made up of many components that must work together in unison, and so if one sense (such as hearing, in this case) is affected, everything else must be as well.

The authors conclude that “part of the solution may require federal or state legislation aimed at supporting local efforts or the restoration of federal funding for the Office of Noise Abatement and Control” (Goines and Hagler 293). However, the government can only pass so many laws to combat noise; personally, I have noticed buses and cars continue to blare their horns even though there is a $350 fine for doing so, and this probably means that enforcement of the pre-existing laws is just too lax. Excessive pessimism does not help either. As discussed in many of our other classes, education is the most powerful force, since people will develop personal connections to their environment, and they will then receive incentives to save it not just for them, but for their descendants and the rest of the ecosystems that they belong to.

“Mapping New York’s Noisiest Neighborhoods” Response

Noise pollution is not something that we can easily see, like air or water pollution, but its effects can still be very damaging, disrupting sleep cycles, causing deafness, and overall just being unpleasant and psychologically disturbing. We all deal with it to some extent on a daily basis, given the traffic on the streets and the screeching from the trains on the subways, and some of us (like me) are unlucky enough to live close to airports. Regardless of where we live, we have unfortunately become accustomed to the noise. Just taking a day trip to the suburbs or countryside shows how much quieter and peaceful it can be there, but the relative silence becomes uncomfortable, and we sometimes miss all of the honking and music that we loathe when we are in the city. But just as all cities have extraordinarily high levels of noise, they all differ in their sources, and this article showed how even small neighborhoods, some of which border each other, can have drastically different sources of noise pollution as well.

The most interesting statistic that I found was that “311 logged more than a hundred and forty thousand noise-related complaints between the winter of 2013 and the fall of 2014. That works out to one complaint every four minutes, day in and day out, all year”, and represents one call for every sixty people, assuming that nobody made multiple calls. The article’s graphs and charts were very helpful in terms of visualizing the geography and frequency of these complaints, and it came as no surprise that most were made during the late night hours; for the city that never sleeps, it seems that sleep is one of the most important things that a New Yorker can have. Even though highly commercialized neighborhoods, especially in parts of Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, have the highest number of complaints, probably given the large amounts of taxis and construction going on, residential neighborhoods in eastern Queens near Long Island or parts of Staten Island have their own sources of noise, primarily since many have single-family houses that can afford to have dogs roaming outside instead of apartments.

While the article went extremely in depth in terms of mapping the loudest areas of the city and briefly mentioned solutions, it neglected to show that noise pollution can have devastating effects on animals. Common pets like dogs and cats have a much stronger sense of hearing than we do, so we can just imagine how stressed out they can become from noises that we disregard as minimal. Even heavy vibrations from bass subwoofers in cars can reverberate in the streets and damage the ground and any habitats for animals in those areas, and they may be forced to move to new locations that are very hard for them to adjust to. This just shows how noise pollution, despite not being as tangible as other ecological problems that our city battles, is just as destructive. After reading the article, it is definitely a very broad issue that will require many different solutions catered to specific neighborhoods, but any change, no matter how small, is better than no change at all.